iOS Development Company

We Built an App Apple Named Best of the Year.

Unfold won Apple’s Best of the Year. It won Google’s Best of the Year. It won Fast Company’s Innovation by Design award. Apple featured it as App of the Day. Selena Gomez uses it. Millions of creators use it to make content for Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Squarespace acquired it.

We built it.

That is the kind of iOS engineering we do. Not MVPs that die in TestFlight. Production apps that Apple recognizes, users love, and acquirers buy.

EltexSoft is a boutique iOS app development company headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, with a senior-only engineering team in Ukraine. 35-50 engineers. We have been building native iOS apps in Swift since 2015. Eleven years. Our average client engagement is more than three years. Our rates are $50-99/hr. Our clients include Unfold, Shell, FreeStuffFinder, HeyTutor, MOTTIV, and RiseMD.

Apple’s installed base crossed 2.5 billion active devices in early 2026. The App Store averages over 813 million weekly visitors. iPhone users drive the majority of global mobile app revenue despite representing under 30% of devices. If you want to monetize, you want iOS. If you want iOS done right, you want a team that knows what Apple actually expects.

What We Build on iOS

Award-Winning Creative Apps

Unfold is a story and content creation app used by millions of creators worldwide. Apple named it Best of the Year. Google named it Best of the Year. Fast Company recognized it for Innovation by Design. Apple featured it as App of the Day.

Unfold is the app that makes your Instagram Stories look like they took hours to craft, even if you made them in under a minute. Hundreds of templates for Stories, Reels, TikTok, and Snapchat. Photo and video editing tools. An AI background remover. A link-in-bio site builder. Squarespace acquired it.

We built the iOS app. The kind of iOS engineering that wins Apple’s recognition is not just writing Swift that compiles. It is pixel-perfect rendering, smooth 60fps animations under real-world memory constraints, correct lifecycle management across background/foreground transitions, and the design discipline that Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines demand. Unfold is proof that we can deliver at that level.

Enterprise iOS for Fortune-Class Companies

We built mobile products for Shell, the global energy major that serves approximately 32 million customers per day at its mobility sites. Shell’s mobile ecosystem spans fuel payment, loyalty (25+ million Fuel Rewards members), EV charging, and fleet management. Enterprise iOS at Shell’s scale means App Transport Security compliance, Keychain-first secrets handling, certificate pinning, background refresh orchestration, and the kind of release discipline where a crash in production affects millions of customers.

Consumer Apps with Real Traction

FreeStuffFinder is a deals and coupons app founded by Tina Su in 2011. The brand has helped 43 million shoppers, reaches over a million monthly readers, and has 2.2 million social media followers across platforms. This is the type of consumer iOS app where push notification timing, content delivery speed, deep linking, and StoreKit monetization architecture make or break the business.

EdTech and Marketplace iOS

HeyTutor is a long-running EdTech partnership. It’s a tutoring marketplace connecting students, tutors, parents, and school districts. The iOS components handle search, booking, scheduling, messaging, and payments across multiple user roles. Years of continuous iOS development means we have shipped through Swift 2, Swift 3, Swift 4, Swift 5, and now Swift 6. The codebase evolved with the language.

Fitness, Health, and HealthKit

MOTTIV (formerly Triathlon Taren) ships an iOS client with training plans, workout tracking, content delivery, and HealthKit integration for endurance athletes. RiseMD is our healthcare reference. A platform where clinical data handling, on-device privacy, and HIPAA-aware architecture are non-negotiable.

HealthKit, workout sessions, health data authorization, and on-device processing are engineering specialties, not checkboxes. Health data stays on-device unless explicitly required, and when it leaves, it travels through encrypted, audited channels.

How We Engineer iOS Apps

Swift 6 and SwiftUI

Swift 6 is now required for all new App Store submissions (Xcode 16 mandate since April 2025). Starting April 28, 2026, Apple requires Xcode 26 and the iOS 26 SDK. Teams that haven’t planned their migration will find their releases stop shipping.

We write new iOS code in Swift 6 with SwiftUI. SwiftUI adoption is at approximately 65% among iOS development teams. UIKit is not dead. 70-80% of larger codebases still require it, but greenfield work is SwiftUI by default.

Swift Concurrency is the model we use everywhere: async/await, structured tasks, actors, @MainActor, and Sendable. No more GCD callback pyramids. No more unstructured threading bugs.

Architecture

MVVM with SwiftUI’s native state management (@State, @StateObject, @EnvironmentObject, @Observable). Combine where reactive streams add value. Clean Architecture with protocol-based dependency injection for testability. Coordinator pattern for complex navigation in UIKit-heavy codebases.

Build, CI/CD, and Release Engineering

Every iOS project follows the same engineering pipeline:

Build configuration: Xcode project with separate schemes for Debug, Staging, and Production. Environment-specific API endpoints, bundle identifiers, and provisioning profiles. Xcconfig files for build settings that shouldn’t live in the Xcode project file.

Continuous integration: Xcode Cloud or GitHub Actions + Fastlane. The pipeline runs SwiftLint, compiles for all target architectures, runs unit tests (Swift Testing + XCTest), runs UI tests for critical flows, and generates a TestFlight build. No PR merges without green CI.

Code quality gates: SwiftLint for style enforcement. SwiftFormat for consistent formatting. Periphery for dead code detection. Custom build phases that fail on TODO/FIXME in release builds.

TestFlight and release management: Every release goes through internal testing, then external beta testers, then a phased App Store release (1% → 5% → 25% → 100%, monitoring crash rates at each phase). We use App Store Connect API automation for build submission, changelog management, and phased release control.

App Store review discipline: Apple rejected approximately 25% of all submissions in 2024, which is 1.93 million out of 7.77 million per Apple’s own 2024 App Store Transparency Report. Our team’s first-attempt approval rate is significantly higher because we treat Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and App Store Review Guidelines as engineering requirements built into our review checklist, not afterthoughts discovered during rejection.

Monitoring: Sentry or Firebase Crashlytics for crash reporting. Custom breadcrumbs and user-context tags. Performance monitoring for cold start time, network latency, and frame drops. MetricKit for Apple-native diagnostics.

Testing

We don’t ship untested iOS apps.

Unit tests: Swift Testing framework (introduced in Swift 6) for new code. XCTest for legacy. Every ViewModel, Service, and Manager has test coverage. Dependency injection via protocols means everything is testable in isolation.

Snapshot tests: Point-Free’s snapshot testing library for visual regression detection. Every key screen has a snapshot baseline that CI validates against.

UI tests: XCUITest for critical user flows like onboarding, purchase, booking, and login. These run on every CI build against the staging environment.

Integration tests: Real API calls against staging with test accounts. StoreKit Testing for in-app purchase flows without hitting production servers.

Device coverage: iPhone (latest + two prior generations), iPad, and Apple Watch when applicable. We test on physical devices, not just the simulator. Simulator catches 80% of issues. The remaining 20% (memory pressure, thermal throttling, real-world network conditions) require hardware.

Security

App Transport Security enforced. Keychain for all credentials and tokens, never UserDefaults for sensitive data. Certificate pinning for API communication. Data Protection API for file-level encryption at rest. Biometric authentication via LocalAuthentication framework. Jailbreak detection where enterprise requirements demand it.

Apple Platform Integrations

We build across the full Apple ecosystem when the product warrants it:

WidgetKit and Live Activities for glanceable information on the home screen and Dynamic Island.

App Intents and Shortcuts so Siri and the Shortcuts app can drive your app’s core actions.

StoreKit 2 for subscriptions, in-app purchases, and server-side receipt verification. RevenueCat where it accelerates time-to-market.

HealthKit for fitness and clinical data: workout sessions, health records, on-device processing.

Apple Watch with watchOS complications, Health Services, and standalone watch apps.

CarPlay for navigation, media, messaging, charging, and food ordering within Apple’s template-based framework.

Push Notifications via APNs with rich notifications, notification service extensions, and content extensions.

Native vs Cross-Platform on iOS

iOS users notice when an app doesn’t feel native. Apple’s design language is opinionated. The gap between a well-built SwiftUI app and a Flutter or React Native app on iOS is often visible in the App Store rating, where a 0.3-0.5 star difference is common.

Go native (Swift + SwiftUI) for any consumer app where rating, retention, and brand polish matter. For anything with HealthKit, ARKit, visionOS, Live Activities, Widgets, or Watch integration. For any app where Apple’s approval team will scrutinize design compliance. Unfold won Apple’s Best of the Year because it feels like it belongs on iOS.

Go cross-platform when budget is constrained, when iOS and Android need identical feature parity at MVP, or when shared business logic matters more than platform-specific UX polish. Flutter, React Native, and Kotlin Multiplatform all have their place.

Go Kotlin Multiplatform when your iOS and Android teams want to share networking, validation, and domain models while keeping native SwiftUI and Compose UIs. KMP has been stable since November 2023. Netflix, McDonald’s, and Cash App use it in production.

We build native first. We’ll tell you when cross-platform is the right call.

What It Costs

Senior iOS engineer (dedicated): $50-99/hr. A full-time dedicated developer costs $8,000-$16,000/month.

By project type:

MVP with 3-5 core screens: $25K-$80K, 4-6 months.

Mid-market product with StoreKit, API integrations, and multi-role auth: $80K-$250K, 6-9 months.

Enterprise platform with compliance controls, MDM, and offline-first: $250K-$500K+, 9-18 months.

Annual maintenance: budget 15-20% of build cost for iOS updates, deprecation handling, and feature work. iOS 26 and Swift 6 transitions are real engineering events that require planning, not last-minute scrambles.

Compare to US iOS agencies at $100-$200/hr or offshore shops at $20-$65/hr. Our $50-99/hr rate puts us in the Eastern European premium tier with named App Store apps that most agencies cannot match.

Objective-C and UIKit Migration

If your app is still running significant Objective-C or pure UIKit code, the clock is ticking. Apple’s SDK direction is Swift and SwiftUI. Each year, more APIs ship Swift-only. The Xcode 26 requirement in April 2026 tightens the compiler expectations further.

Our migration approach:

Module by module, not all at once. Mixed Objective-C/Swift codebases are fully supported and common in production apps. We add Swift modules alongside existing Objective-C, migrate one feature at a time, and decommission Objective-C files only when the replacement has full test coverage.

UIKit to SwiftUI via hosting. UIHostingController lets you embed SwiftUI views inside UIKit screens and vice versa. We migrate the highest-value screens first (typically onboarding, settings, and new features) while leaving stable UIKit screens untouched until the migration reaches them.

Swift Concurrency adoption. Pre-Swift 6 code using GCD, operation queues, and completion handlers gets incrementally migrated to async/await and actors. We enable strict concurrency checking module by module, fixing data-race warnings before they become compiler errors.

Typical timelines: a 50-screen UIKit app migrates to SwiftUI progressively over 4-8 months. An Objective-C codebase takes 6-12 months depending on size and test coverage.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique iOS app development company. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

Our iOS clients include Unfold (Apple’s Best of the Year, acquired by Squarespace), Shell, FreeStuffFinder, HeyTutor, MOTTIV, and RiseMD. We also build Android apps, Laravel backends, Django APIs, Vue.js frontends, and React applications.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

We have shipped iOS apps through every major platform transition since 2015: Objective-C to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI, callbacks to async/await, and now into Swift 6 strict concurrency and visionOS. The team that builds your app today has the depth to maintain it through iOS 27 and beyond.

30-minute technical call. Bring your App Store app, your UIKit migration headache, or your new product idea. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

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